My name is Joe Roberts, I work for the state,
I'm a sergeant out of Perrineville, Barracks Number 8,
I always done an honest job, as honest as I could,
I got a brother named Frankie and Frankie ain't no good.

Sean Penn based his first outing as a film writer-director on
"Highway Patrolman," a song from Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska
-- the Boss's bleak look at the despair under the surface of the American
dream and the convictions that allow people to survive it. It's not necessary
to know the song to appreciate the movie, but it adds another dimension to
think of the movie in the context of a folk song with the ending embedded
in its chorus, "A man turns his back on his family, well, he just ain't
no good."

The Indian Runner centers on two brothers, Joe and Frank
Roberts -- the former a farmer turned police officer, the latter a drifter
who served in Vietnam and spent time in prison. After a family tragedy in
the late 1960s, Frank comes back to town with his pregnant girlfriend Dorothy.
They move into his late parents' house and Frank gets a job as a welder in
the construction of a new highway bridge. But restless, violent impulses continue
to plague Frank, despite Joe's efforts to show him that the joys of family
and home can sustain a man through hard times.

Joe is satisfied to spend time with his wife and son, to grow
vegetables in his backyard and to try to be a good cop. But Frank says that
Joe lost his fire when he lost his farm and believes they are both doomed
to the slow desperation that destroyed their parents. The only way Frank knows
how to fight it is by acting out brutally. He marries Dorothy and tries to
emulate his older brother's acceptance of the simple pleasures of life, but
he can't control his resentment. This is a world in which everyone needs a
coping mechanism -- Joe smokes, his wife Maria sneaks pot into the house --
but Frank takes all his forms of release to excess, throwing tantrums, drinking
himself into oblivion and getting into bar-fights because he doesn't like
the way someone glances at him.

The film never makes clear how Frank became so damaged. A tour
of duty in Vietnam clearly left scars, as did his twelve-stepping mother and
repressed, prejudiced father. Yet Joe has emerged remarkably unscathed from
a similar childhood and is coping with having lost his farm. He's respected
as a policeman, admired by the kooky old folk of the town. When he's forced
to shoot a man in the line of duty, he vomits and weeps afterward. For Joe,
the love of simple things isn't just an idea to which he gives lip-service;
it's sufficient reason to be happy no matter how bad things become outside.
Thus he is compelled to try to save Frank even though he knows his brother
may be beyond hope.

The Indian Runner takes its title from a myth Frank describes
to Joe during a drunken conversation late one night beside a cornfield. The
field used to be part of Joe's farm, and Joe can't look at it without visualizing
how much better it looked when he owned it. Frank claims that Indian runners
carrying messages used to roam that land, safe from wolves and bears because
of their incredible speed: "Independent of time and space, the runner
becomes his message." He makes a doubtful Joe chase him through the dark
cornfield to prove that a runner could outrun any predator, insisting that
if Joe is a bear, then he is a message.

But the Indians exist only in Frank's hallucinations, and the
message seems to be that he can't run fast enough to escape from himself.
He sees visions of a painted, aging Indian runner several times during the
film, always during acts of escapism -- twice while fleeing painful family
situations and once in the midst of committing a horrific act of violence
that will remove him forever from his previous bonds. Joe receives a different
sort of message when he digs a garden in his yard in a limited attempt to
regain his passion: he finds an arrowhead buried in the soil, which he interprets
as a blessing. It's a small thing, yet it epitomizes the fundamental differences
between the brothers. Frank divides all men into heroes and outlaws, romanticizing
himself as the latter while mocking Joe as the passive good guy. But Joe insists
that men only come strong and weak, "and you ain't strong."

Still, Joe loves Frank, and may be the only person who ever
has done so with the comprehension of Frank's darkness that immature Dorothy
lacks. The brothers speak a funny rhyming language and fall into humorous
patter together like twins. There's a perverse intimacy to Frank's contact
with Joe, with whom he dances flamboyantly at his own wedding to a woman he
calls "little sister." Frank has no qualms about standing around
naked in front of an embarrassed Joe or being tickled silly by him, but it's
nearly impossible for Frank to express painful feelings to him, particularly
about the losses in their family and his doubts about raising a child. Not
so Joe; upon realizing that Frank admires their suicidal father for the courage
of his convictions, Joe says only, "I love you anyway."

Visually, the film emphasizes working-class disenfranchisement
and puts an ostensibly political spin on Frank's problems. The film opens
and closes on barren landscapes -- a snow-covered field, a deserted, dark
highway -- yet Joe sees the possibility of abundance everywhere, fields that
could be planted, while his brother sees only Hell, epitomized by the flames
of the welding equipment he uses to fix a bridge "for fat retired men
and their fat wives and fat kids to drive over in their motor homes."
A giant, soiled U.S. flag flies near the hotel where he stays when he is released
from prison -- an ugly image of the promise of freedom and prosperity that
he can't seem to grasp. The bars of Frank's prison cell are recalled later
in the metal beams of the bridge, and the blood spilled in the opening sequence
returns again and again as a symbol of blood bonds.

Frank's tattoos, which are among the more memorable images in
The Indian Runner, form an odd combination of patriotic and rebellious
images. One tattoo has the words "mom" and "pop" crossing
each other. One depicts an animal skull. There's an eagle extending its talons
toward one nipple and a spiderweb surrounding the other. The letters over
Frank's knuckles read "KILL" and "FUCK," and he has a
swastika on his forearm. He also has a Confederate flag on display in his
living room, yet he wears American flags on his cowboy hat.

The cowboys-and-Indians theme recurs in the form of old family
movie footage of Frank and Joe playing as kids, with Frank in the role of
cowboy, shooting toy guns at his relatives. It's ironic given his self-definition
as an Indian runner, just as it's ironic that we first see Frank wearing his
uniform from Vietnam -- looking like a hero, as Joe says. With his stereotypical
markings as an angry young man, Frank is at once an anti-hero and a tragic
figure. He could be a quintessentially American symbol of his era, but too
many loose ends distance him from the horrors of Vietnam and the poverty of
the heartland. It's not clear what made Frank such a sad being, nor what message
he carries for anyone else.

In one of the movie's superb sequences set to music -- in this
case, Jefferson Airplane's "Comin' Back To Me" -- Frank turns up
uninvited at a party at a mansion and steals a car. While rich kids dance
and prepare to eat a roasted pig, Frank robs a gas station, then destroys
the getaway vehicle by pouring gasoline over it and lighting it on fire with
a lei from the party, dropped from a bridge. Meanwhile, Dorothy waits for
him in agonized boredom as her parents watch TV; Joe watches an old war movie
and tries to sleep; and their father watches movies of Frank and Joe as children,
sliding into depression. "I realize I've been here before," the
song plays as Joe lies in bed smoking and his tearful father leaves the room
with the camera still running. Only Frank and his girlfriend seem to be going
anywhere in the present, though they're driving into the night with stolen
money.

It's hard to come up with a simple interpretation of the bleak
fact that Frank appears to be right about Joe lacking fire, and his son may
be destined for the same painfully limited life as his father. Still, as Joe
points out to Frank, his violent, dangerous, destructive alternatives are
far worse. On several occasions the soundtrack employs a man's heartbeat to
suggest that Frank is trapped not by his origins or his lack of prospects,
but within his own body, from which there is no escape but death.

The bleakness of The Indian Runner is offset by astonishingly
vivid performances, particularly by David Morse as Joe and Viggo Mortensen
as Frank, but also Charles Bronson as their father and Patricia Arquette as
Dorothy. The protagonists and their relationships are multidimensional and
credible, even though many of the background characters border on carnivalesque
(a bearded lady, a quirky bartender played by the iconic Dennis Hopper).

The style of the film is reflective of that of John Cassavetes,
who is one of its dedicatees. It's free of flashbacks and overdramatized tearful
scenes; Joe cries a lot, Frank rarely, but neither does so at expected moments
like funerals or partings. The engaging soundtrack offers subtle comments
on the events of the film but doesn't attempt to manipulate the viewer's emotions
with swelling crescendos or sad ballads during appropriate scenes. This is
not a movie for the squeamish -- in addition to explicit footage of a woman
giving birth, there's a great deal of bloodletting -- but it's a gutsy offering
from a first-time director, spare and unsparing, without a trace of feel-good
cliché.

Penn does close The Indian Runner with a Rabindranath
Tagore quote about every new child bringing the message that God is not yet
discouraged of man. Yet it's hard not to think of the warning offered by Springsteen
at the end of the song that inspired the movie: "A man turns his back
on his family, he ain't no friend of mine." Like those mythical native
predecessors, Frank may attain the swiftness of the deer, but the message
he brings stands in stark contrast to that of his brother -- that of despair
and death versus life and hope.